New Poems

I recently watched the movie Frida about the life of Mexican painter/feminist/politician Frida Kahlo. I can't stop thinking about the tragedy involved in this woman's dealings with life, love and art. These poems are the outcome of those thoughts. I hope you enjoy.

It was just a fuck. I've given more affection in a handshake.
–Diego Rivera

To Diego (on sorrow)

¡La cogiste!
My God, Diego,
anyone but my sister!
¡La cogiste!

I am a vessel, used and tragically tied to my loss.
Married to inconsistency.
Shackled to sorrow.
Subdued by abortion.
And there is nothing you can do now to make it all seem right.

So I will hack the blackness,
And shape feminine growth,
Into emasculated pride.
A statement of what was and what is.

It's like the accident all over again,
A steel rod is shoved through my back,
And takes my virginity.
Oh, how I wanted it to be yours!

I am a wounded deer. A running, wounded deer.
The arrows are all women that have no faces,
Only perfume that rubs off in the act of crashing.
I thought you would stop with them. With loyalty!

I am the sister of a whore.
You were you,
And she was she.
But now you are an adulterous one.

I am the sister of a goddess.
Whose very heart rushes blood through my veins.
And spurts stains on my white dress.
I could not live but for her. I could not die but for her.

I am a stark Roman column!
Who has found hope in the bodies of other men (and women)!
Who has weathered the rains of tragedy, and pain, and loss,
And refuses to shed a single hope to the disappointment of nature!

You are not I,
And I am not You,
Yet when I find me, I
Am hopelessly entangled in us.

La cogiste.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Frida Kahlo
(as played by Selma Hayek)

This corpse is still breathing.

Tragedy, pure tragedy, does not strike often.
And if it does, it runs like a demon cast out by the Lord himself,
to find the next innocent victim.
I, however, have a history of such demons.
They nest in my bones,
caress my very column with the arousing fingers of death.

This corpse is still healing.

Diego says my scar is immaculate.
It runs from the small of my back,
around the hip and into my garden.
I told the doctors that the pipe stole my virginity.
It’s not true though. I was fucking boys in my closet a year before the accident.

This corpse is still lusting.

There’s really no beauty like that of the female body.
To have breasts--big, weighty breasts--is to have honey,
That all the gods want and need.
Even the goddesses want to drink from my supply.

This corpse is still needing.

Diego is my sustenance
in a dying world--my dying world.
To be with him is to sup--
to dine with God in art and passion and sex.

This corpse is still leaving.

I painted myself in a mirror today.
I looked proud like the Romans.
My eyebrows grown together like the wings of a sparrow.
One day they’ll carry me away, away from this tragedy.

This corpse is still breathing.